It’s important to begin our recap of day two by starting with night one. While sitting around the hot tub Morgan set our expectations for the next day’s riding – in particular, that there would be about 1,000ft of climbing throughout the ~60mi day. This seemed reasonable since the elevation profile we had seen online went downhill. And since it was the climbing (and uphill push-biking) the day before that was the biggest mood killer, we were banking on day two being better.

During the winter, my buddy Morgan got it in his head that we should do a mountain bike bikepacking trip over spring break. With unpredictable spring weather in the Northeast, he looked south. And east. And that’s how we ended up in California attempting the Stagecoach 400 route.